02/09 @ 8pm - Unsound Festival New York: Zavoloka + Bora Yoon + Zenial
Zenial
Zenial is Lukasz Szalankiewicz, a long-time feature on Poland’s experimental and electronic music scene, as both musician and curator. In terms of his own productions, he remains a fiercely independent figure, working in genres from noise to ambient. He has played around the world, in countries in Europe, Asia, South America. He is also part of the duo Aabzu. Zenial has worked as a co-curator of Unsound Festival in Krakow, as well as Krakow’s renowned Audio Art Festival. As well as this, he has created several compilations of experimental music from Asia, and is a co-founder of the net label Audiotong.
Bora Yoon
Bora Yoon is an experimental multi-instrumentalist, composer and performer, who creates architectural soundscapes from found objects, chamber instruments, digital devices, and voice. Featured in WIRE magazine and on the front page of The Wall Street Journal for her musical innovations—Yoon has presented her original soundwork ( (( PHONATION )) ) internationally, at Lincoln Center, the Nam June Paik Museum in Seoul, Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok, the Bang on a Can Marathon, BAM, and John Zorn’s Stone. Her music has been presented by Samsung and the Electronic Music Foundation; commissioned by the Young People’s Chorus Chorus of NYC and SAYAKA Ladies Chorale of Tokyo; awarded by Billboard, BMI, and Arion Foundation; and published by Swirl Records, MIT Press, and the Journal of Popular Noise. Upcoming plans include custom instrument design and performance with LEMUR; recording and remix projects with DJ Spooky, Meredith Monk, and early music group New York Polyphony; and a wax cylinder record for UK phonograph artist Aleks Kolkowski’s museum collection— while ( (( PHONATION )) ) continues to resonate and rarefact in concert. www.borayoon.com
ABOUT ( (( PHONATION )) ):
( (( PHONATION )) ) is a multimedia solo performance by Bora Yoon with live video manipulations by Luke DuBois — exploring where sound connects to the subliminal using found sounds, new and antiquated instruments, electronic devices, and voice. Using a sound designer’s approach to performance composition that is steered by a penchant for a song, ( (( PHONATION )) ) engages with music as music, and not as part of a genre, taking the means to one end, and using it for another to form new utterances of sound and the beginnings of a new sonic language, within its spatial and architectural context. In every case, a particular sonic geography is evoked that might be inspired by a simple, found-sound in the world, or an expression of a sonic paradox bouncing around only in the mind.
LUKE DUBOIS (Video)
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival. An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema. DuBois has lived for the last fifteen years in New York City. He teaches at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
Zavoloka
Zavoloka is one of Ukraine and Eastern Europe’s premier electronic musicians, having found a voice that is all her own, fusing beats and experimentation, whilst drawing on traditional Ukrainian music she self-records. This creates a sound far more radical than any kind of imagined world music. Her work has earned her praise from the likes of Wire Magazine. Her debut work, released in 2005, found her receiving an honorary mention at the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. Zavoloka has also played at festivals across Europe, including Club Transmediale and Unsound Krakow. She has also collaborated with artists such as AGF. Her New York appearance will be her first ever show in North America, and should not be missed.
http://www.myspace.com/zavoloka
Unsound Festival New York
Unsound Festival New York, Co-Presented by:
Unsound, Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York.
In Co-operation With:
Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Romanian Cultural Institute New York, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Consulate General of Finland New York, Pro Helvetia, Fonds Pop Over Zee
Blurb:
“Since 2003, Unsound Festival, Poland’s most adventurous music festival, has brought a bold and uniquely modern program of music to Kraków, a city previously unknown for this kind of experimentation. Now, with seven festivals in their native city under their belt (and outpost events further east in cities like Minsk), Unsound is coming west to New York for their first ever North American edition. Unsound Festival New York’s mission is to forge new links between music genres, between generations and even between artistic practices.
The driving force in the assembling of the New York program has been Unsound Festival’s commitment to forms of music and sound art that involve experimentation and risk. Unsound Festival has made a worldwide reputation by breaking new ground while dealing with vibrant electronic, experimental, independent, post-classical and club music scenes from around the world.
Taking place over the course of nine days starting on Thursday February 4th 2010, Unsound Festival New York will boast an ambitious lineup of artists from both Europe and the US.
One of the cornerstones of the festival is Eastern Promises, a substantial undertaking in the New York program that aims to expose a wide range of musicians from east of Berlin that have long been ignored in North America. Never before has this broad a range of producers and musicians from Eastern Europe been assembled to perform alongside their US and West European counterparts. Confirmed for the festival are techno artists Jacek Sienkiewicz (Poland), Petre Inspirescu (Romania) and Marcin Czubala (Poland), minimalist composer Jacaszek (Poland), experimentalist Zavoloka (Ukraine), bass mutator TRG (Romania), new music ensemble Kwartludium (Poland), dub electronic artist Pavel Ambiont (Belarus), drone specialist Zenial (Poland) and a special exhibition of historical Polish Soundcards.
Unsound Festival New York will also feature a special series of events dedicated to and inspired by Andy Warhol. The Warhol Program will feature the worldwide debut of Carl Craig (USA) and nsi (Germany) performing live electronic soundtracks to vintage Warhol films, as well as the North American debut of Groupshow (Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler and Hanno Leichtmann) (Germany) performing an eight-hour long live improvised soundtrack to Andy Warhol’s “Empire.” Additionally video artist Lillevan (Germany) will be creating a special series of Warhol inspired screen tests during the festival.
Additionally, Unsound Festival New York will feature the US live debut of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio (Germany), the US debut of Vladislav Delay (Finland) & Lillevan’s audio / video performance, a special program of the music of Henryk Gorecki, classical interpretations of the music of infamous US punk noise label SST, two nights of noise, drone and experimental work, a Brooklyn electronic music showcase, two nights at the Bunker featuring the very best in contemporary Techno / House and a special Bass Mutations showcase dedicated to dubstep and beyond. In addition, there will be a unique festival feature called Kids Patch (a special kids only workshop in electronic music), thought-provoking panel discussions and unique film screenings.”
